Illusions and delusions of happiness (Caroline West)
January 1st 2007 00:01
The theory side of the lecture seemed to derive from Peter Singer's 1994 Ethics reader.
For some more thoughts on the topic, see Dr West's Philosopher's Zone interview from Saturday 8 April 2006.
***
Illusions and delusions of happiness
* There are broadly three theories of the good: hedonistic theories (narrow or preference), desire fulfilment (which needn't result in conscious experience), and objective list.
* The dialogue between Mustapha Mond and the Savage in Brave New World, and the story of the good brahmin in Voltaire, illustrate that desirable states of consciousness alone are insufficient for the good life.
* Dr West's preferred theory was "idealized desire fulfilment". What makes your life go best is satisfying those desires you have under ideal, informed conditions.
* According to psychologists:
-- Income below a certain level leads to suffering, but income above a certain level ($30,000 or $40,000) doesn't significantly increase happiness/desire fulfilment.
-- Beauty and intelligence don't significantly increase happiness/desire fulfilment.
-- Some (but not all) good and bad is adaptive. You don't, in the long-term, become significantly happier when you win the lottery or significantly less happy if you're rendered paraplegic. (An idea mentioned in "Before Sunset".)
-- Factors that decrease happiness/desire fulfilment and which you don't adapt to include: unemployment for one or two years (has permanent effect), long commuting times to work (anything longer than 20 minutes), sleep deprivation, and inequality with people you can relate to (it's better to be the richest house on a poor street than the poorest on a rich street).
-- Factors that increase happiness/desire fulfilment and which you don't adapt to include: humour, volunteering, close personal relationships, and free time (though not, she mentioned specifically, when spent on CSI, which damages your sense of security -- it's best spent with friends or in the community, and is better when it involves physical activity).
-- People are bad judges of what their desires are, and of what will lead to happiness/desire fulfilment.
-- The happiest people are conservative-voting narcissists in northern Europe.
-- Happiness peaks at ages 40–49.
* It is unclear how the morally good life connects to the prudentially good life.
***
Some further thoughts on this topic -- "Pursuing Happiness" by John Lanchester, 20 February 2006, a New Yorker book review of Jonathan Haidt's “The Happiness Hypothesis” and Darrin McMahon's “Happiness: A History”.
Note that Lanchester, in the latter part of the review, seems to confuse "voluntary action" (freely chosen actions) with "voluntary work" (helping with charities, volunteering) (and also, understandably, misspells "Csikszentmihalyi").
Extract follows:
Martin Seligman
... The simplest kind of unhappiness is that caused by poverty. People living in poverty become happier if they become richer -- but the effect of increased wealth cuts off at a surprisingly low figure. The British economist Richard Layard, in his stimulating book “Happiness: Lessons from a New Science,” puts that figure at fifteen thousand dollars, and leaves little doubt that being richer does not make people happier. Americans are about twice as rich as they were in the nineteen-seventies but report not being any happier; the Japanese are six times as rich as they were in 1950 and aren’t any happier, either. Looking at the data from all over the world, it is clear that, instead of getting happier as they become better off, people get stuck on a “hedonic treadmill”: their expectations rise at the same pace as their incomes, and the happiness they seek remains constantly just out of reach.
According to positive psychologists, once we’re out of poverty the most important determinant of happiness is our “set point,” a natural level of happiness that is (and this is one of the movement’s most controversial claims) largely inherited. We adapt to our circumstances; we don’t, or can’t, adapt our genes. The evidence for this set point, and the phrase itself, came from a study of identical twins by the behavioral geneticist David Lykken, which concluded that “trying to be happier is like trying to be taller.” Contrary to everything you might think, “in the long run, it doesn’t much matter what happens to you,” Haidt writes. Consider the opposing examples of winning the lottery or of losing the use of your limbs. According to Haidt, “It’s better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you’d think... Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness.”
... we have these innate set points... nothing much that happens to us changes our disposition... I read this study where they followed people who won the lottery, and people who had become paraplegic... after about 6 months... as soon as people got used to their new situation, they were more or less the same... Like if they were basically an optimistic, jovial person, they're now an optimistic, jovial person, in a wheel chair. If they're a petty miserable asshole, ok, they're a petty miserable asshole with a new Cadillac, a house and a boat.
... the news that we’re on a hedonic treadmill, so that we end up where we’re always bound to end up, is so contrary to our fundamental appetites for exertion and the next new thing, that nobody can really accept it. So Lykken himself, the fellow who came up with the finding about the set point, went on to write a book about how to become happier. (It contained his favorite recipe for Key-lime pie.) Positive psychology has even devised a formula for how to be happy, where H is your level of happiness, S is your set point, C is the conditions of your life, and V is the voluntary activities you do. Ready for the secret of happiness? Here it is:
H=S plus C plus V
In other words, your happiness consists of how happy you naturally are, plus whatever is going on in your life to affect your happiness, plus a bit of voluntary work. Well, duh. The only vaguely surprising thing about this is how useful voluntary work can be to the person doing it -- and even that isn’t really news. At the end of the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim performed a huge cross-cultural study of suicide, and found, in Haidt’s words, that “no matter how he parsed the data, people who had fewer social constraints, bonds and obligations were more likely to kill themselves.” The more connected we are to other people, the less likely we are to succumb to despair -- a conclusion that isn’t very distant from the common-sense proposition that lonely people are often unhappy, and unhappy people are often lonely.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The trouble is that asking yourself about your frame of mind is a sure way to lose your flow. If you want to be happy, don’t ever ask yourself if you are. A person in good health in a Western liberal democracy is, in terms of his objective circumstances, one of the most fortunate human beings ever to have walked the surface of the earth. Risk-taking Ig and worried Og both would have regarded our easy, long, riskless lives with incredulous envy. They would have regarded us as so lucky that questions about our state of mind wouldn’t be worth asking. It is a perverse consequence of our fortunate condition that the question of our happiness, or lack of it, presses unhappily hard on us.
***
Caroline West's website is here.
Martin Seligman's website is here.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's website is here.
The quote from "Before Sunset" came from Script-O-Rama. And the image came from Wikipedia.
See also the Sydney Happiness Institute. And the multitude of books now written about positive psychology...
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Comment by katyzzz
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These posts are too long for me. Isn't it true that with Philosophy one can run round and around in circles, getting nowhere, then come up with a circular argument to justify it?
One line response will do just fine. But it seems you have done a wonderful job here, how do you have the patience?
katyzzz......your fine weather friend.
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
One line: Any conversation is the same.
Not much patience required to write this one. Lecture report (which I'd already written), plus edit, copy, and paste of an article I'd already found, and a bit of research for images, webpages, quotes...
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
But I thought it was necessary information to understand the issue, and putting it here has an effect not captured by saying, "Click on this random link and read this much longer article..."
Comment by Damo
I enjoyed reading it.
That made me happy
but the I started to think
That made me unhappy
After all this measuring and prodding over happiness I am no closer to knowing what it is.
I we are happy what is this think we call happiness?
In the book 'Illussions' Richard Bach touched upon this concept of happiness as being what are at the moment. Even if we are un happy it is because we are happy to be unhappy at that time. If we are happy it is because we choose to be happy. I am paraphrasing baddly but his concept is simple.
When we talk to a person who has no reason to be un happy and is, it is because that is how they look when they are happy.
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
Don't have much to say about the Richard Bach idea, but am reflecting on it.
About the definition of the word...
I don't know if positive psychology, in general, has a definition. It's possible that the method is as crude as asking people, "How happy are you now?", and then inquiring into common denominators between their survey subjects. The definition of happiness is left mysterious, as is the causation -- one can speculate on why long commuting times permanently damage happiness levels, or volunteering increases them, but statistics would simply register the correlations, even if the explanation was complex.
Personally, I think "happiness" is a vague word... For instance, in everyday usage, it sometimes seems to refers to a particular emotion (what Nozick called "rosy moments"); at other times it means "the good life", "whatever is best" or even "whatever is most wanted"; and at other times still it refers to satisfied engagement -- for instance in the phrase to be happy doing something...
Positive psychology surveys, if conducted in the way I suggest, would have the advantage and disadvantage of including all these meanings under the one heading...
"Happy to be unhappy", incidentally, might be a matter of looking like a paradox, but not actually being one. It might play upon the multiple meanings of the word, and be better expressed as "being satisfied to experience emotions other than happiness".
Comment by Anonymous
I would love to hear your thoughts!
Nick